Why don't the bigwigs like RedHat + IBM just fork it already ?
Take OpenJDK , GPL the IBM runtime and slap some stupid coffee inspired nickname on it. People will trust that more than they trust Oracle anyway...
Take OpenJDK , GPL the IBM runtime and slap some stupid coffee inspired nickname on it. People will trust that more than they trust Oracle anyway...
So, neither IBM nor Red Hat have any big issues with the status quo. They get to do their own thing, support their customers, and they get to ship openjdk with no strings attached.
At some point they are going to want see some profits in return given how many Android phones are being sold. And needless to mention how much of world's software runs on Java today.
Don't you think if they wanted to "see some profits" they might've done it already ?
Oracle has sought upward of US$8.8 billion in damages due to the commercial success of the Android system.
Nothing wrong with it, of course. If a company wants customers to pay for their products, then they are right.
People just need to know before hand, than being sold on it as free, and then asked to pay $XK per installation box a few years down the lane.
That depends on how commercially successful your product is. I don't think it would even make logical sense for Oracle to go after every single start up that uses Java.
But lets say tomorrow news came out that a big reason for AWS's success is Java, then all of a sudden you are going to see Oracle want some of that money.
Please note I'm not saying expecting people to pay is necessarily wrong. I'm only saying people need to know what they are signing up for.
The reason Oracle's behavior is so bad, and raises the question of whether Java is really Free Software anymore, is they sued Google over re-implimenting an ostensibly Open Source language.
And if you want to talk Microsoft, the most relevant thing to the discussion is that .Net Core includes explicit language in it's lisence that allows for re-implimenting it, and in fact despite the whole "Microsoft is evil" meme, they never sued Mono, a re-implimentation of their non-Open Source .Net Framework.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Java_virtual_machines#...
Only those that tried to misuse Java by creating partial implementations of it (Microsoft and Google).
In fact, Sun only put a show to avoid losing their face, as what they really wanted was to sue Google, but their bank account wasn't any longer like in the Microsoft suit days.
Gosling interview on how it all came to be from internal point of view, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZYw3X4RZv6Y&feature=youtu.be...
Finally Google had the opportunity to buy Sun assets and thus avoid being sued, while having the freedom to steer Java however they would have liked to do.
Opportunity that they decided wasn't worthwhile to pursue.
> Opportunity that they decided wasn't worthwhile to pursue.
Wow, this is incredible, I always wondered if Google even thought about this. I wonder how different things would be had they just bought out Java from under Sun, or at least the rights to use it as they see fit and allowed Sun to maintain it or some sort of deal? Basically the keys to the Java castle in such a way that lets Sun be Sun and not Oracle. There's a lot of elements to the case that shift everyones views. It's sad we're even seeing such a case so many years later, and likely why Google is going towards having Kotlin (and eventually Kotlin Native) as their main language.
While OpenJDK is, indeed, very much open source, Android did not use it -- although I think it does now -- as they didn't want to use its open source license. Google, on the other hand, uses OpenJDK extensively, and have even forked it internally, without any complaint from Oracle [1].
So no open-source software was the subject of the lawsuit (well, no Oracle open-source software).
> they never sued Mono, a re-implimentation of their non-Open Source .Net Framework.
That is not about benevolence but the simple fact that Mono did not harm their business in any way (few people used it; Microsoft did, however, sue or threaten to sue over the wildly successful Android). On the other hand, licensing Java for use on mobile devices was Sun's main income from Java.
Companies don't generally do things on principle, but for business reasons, nor do they refrain from business out of principle. Both Oracle and Microsoft sued (or threatened to) over Android for business reasons, and Google chose not to use the open-source Java for business reasons.
[1]: https://video.oracle.com/detail/videos/featured-videos/video...
What Android does is to use a subset of OpenJDK, and even that is pretty much dependent on which Android version one is talking about.
So it is still impossible to get a random jar from Maven Central and be certain that it will work of the box on Android, even on Android P.
But doesn't the lawsuit effectively outlaw Apache Harmony, and more generally the practice of reimplementing APIs?
The compiler is used by Android Studio and Gradle plugin, but the bytecode is rebuilt again with d8 or dex. Google has written their own compiler in the past but decided it was unnecessary.
The critical patented parts are not in Dalvik nor in J2SE library.
Because I have never met a single JVM developer who either (a) wants another JVM fork, (b) wants OpenJDK to be undermined or (c) thinks Oracle has been anything other than a pretty great steward of the platform.
-continue using it without updates
-pay for updates (similar how some banks pay MS for getting updates for some older Windows)
-upgrade to a) paid Oracle version b) free OpenJDK c) some other Java re-implementation
-do not upgrade but switch to OpenJDK(say for RedHat if you want support and fixes)
This thing happened before, some product gets EOL and some big budget companies will pay to not upgrade and continue getting support. The only people that are affected is people that would like to get the extended support for free.
Oracle,RedHat and others make money from offering support and updates. IMO Java ecosystem is healthy and competitive, you have alternatives, you have a group of companies working on it, you have many choices where to buy support if you need, you have a lot of tools and libraries that you can use.
I am not using Java but in our project when e need to do some task we always try to use existing work, so we use CLI apps if possible and most of the time this apps are made in Java and are high quality and save us maybe months of work
Sun, Bea and many others used to charge for support as well, IBM still charges for it, but it is good to pay them because it wasn't Oracle it seems.
Plus I belong to Java developers community since the early days, and I quite remember how the Sun, Oracle and IBM triad used to push Java altogether.
Including those NC announcements made by Sun and Oracle.
I suspect if Oracle started pushing their usual bullshit too hard, that's what would happen. And it's a situation where Oracle knows it, Amazon knows it, and everyone is playing game theory.